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Monday, May 27, 2013

Some "Thoughts on Mind & Cosmos" by Thomas Nagel

I have been a fan of Thomas Nagel since I first read his
essay “What It’s like To Be a Bat”.His lucid, common sense analysis was striking to me as an undergraduate
philosophy student.I was
therefore intrigued about his latest book – Mind
and Cosmos, especially since there was such a furor surrounding it.There has been much talk, well in
certain circles, about Mind and Cosmos.

In the debates between theists and non-theists, Nagel’s book
has lauded by the theist side for championing their cause, and treated
as a dangerous betrayal by nontheists. (1) But I think the book is neither.Sure the subtitle, Why
the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False,
may lead you to think that he has landed firmly in the camp of theism, but I
think that would be to go too far.We have to keep in mind that just because Nagel holds neo-Darwinism to
be false doesn’t mean that he believes theism is true.Nagel makes it more than clear that he
is not a theist, he just doesn’t want to base his atheism on something he
considers to be false.And that
indeed is laudable.

So what has caused all the fuss?Nagel claims in Mind
and Cosmos that the dominant naturalistic worldview, which holds that a
blind process of natural selection is responsible for our existence, is
fundamentally flawed.It should
also be noted that he mentions his doubts on the likelihood the ability of
purely physical laws to explain the origin of self-reproducing life forms, and
the likelihood of natural selection producing the life forms we see today in
the available geological time. (2) However, the first sticking point for Nagel comes in his
area of specialty – philosophy of mind. Essentially, he holds that the project
to reduce the mind to physical properties has failed because of the intractable
problem of explaining consciousness.

As Nagel explained in his paper “What Is It Like To Be A Bat?”,
consciousness is essentially subjective and connected with a single point of
view. (3) He explains that we can
understand how a bat’s perception systems works but cannot understand what it
is like to be a bat.Therefore, he
contends that consciousness cannot be reduced to purely physical processes
because that would ignore the subjectivity of consciousness.

For if the facts of experience – facts about what it is
like for the experiencing organism –
are accessible only from one point of view, then it is a mystery how the true
character of experiences could be revealed in the physical operation of that
organism. (4)

In Mind and Cosmos,
Nagel continues this line of thought.He contends that consciousness cannot be accounted for by the widely
held Darwinian worldview.He
writes: “Conscious subjects and their mental lives are inescapable elements of
reality not explainable by the physical sciences”.(5) However, he
also thinks that if mind cannot be reduced to purely physical properties the
whole materialist project is in trouble.

But the failure of reductionism in the philosophy of mind
has implications that extend beyond the mind-body problem.Psychophysical reductionism is an
essential component of a broader naturalistic program, which cannot survive
without it.This naturalistic
program is both metaphysical and physical.It holds that everything in the world is physical and that
everything that happens in the world has its most basic explanation, whether we
come to know it or not, in physical laws.(6)

He elaborates stating that any solution to the mind-body
problem must provide a constitutive account of how “complex physical systems”
like us are simultaneously mental as well as physical, a historic explanation
of how this came about.

He then points out that the answer to these questions must
be either reductionist (reduce us to more basic elements) or emergent
(explaining how pure physical creatures at some level of evolution became
mental as well).

Nagel argues that consciousness cannot be reduced in this
way.He points out that if a
reductionist account is correct, it can’t be reduced to the purely physical.He writes that such an explanation
“will depend on some kind of monism or panpsychism” (7).That is to say, that elementary mental
properties are somehow intrinsically connected with elementary physical
properties.However, Nagel
recognizes that this type of reduction of mental properties would not be
intelligible in the same way that particle physics is intelligible.He states that “panpsychism does not
provide a new, more basic resting place in the search for intelligibility – a
set of basic principles from which more complex results can be seen to
follow”.(8)

Nagel finds an emergent account also unsatisfactory. He also
rejects the idea of emergence of consciousness and reason.That is the conjecture that somehow
through completely natural process dependent on physical entities and forces,
at a certain level of evolutionary development, consciousness and reason, being
non-physical in nature, just appeared.He writes:

That
purely physical elements, when combined in a certain way, should necessarily
produce a state of the whole that is not constituted out of the properties and
relations of the physical parts still seems like magic even if the higher-order
psychophysical dependencies are quite systematic.” (9).

Nagel also points out another problem that he sees with
naturalistic Darwinism.He states
that such a theory cannot explain our capacity to reason to reach out for
objective truths of science and logic because if natural selection does not
select beliefs for their objective truth but for their fitness or survival
value.He writes:

It is not possible to think, “Reliance on my reason,
including my reliance on this very
judgment, is reasonable because it is consistent with its having an
evolutionary explanation.” (10).

Finally, Nagel discusses values.He takes the position, that there are objective moral values,
and holds that the existence of moral values is incompatible with Darwinian
naturalism.Since he holds that
objective moral values exist, he concludes that Darwinian naturalism cannot be
a true or complete picture of reality.He writes:

“[Sharon] Street points out that if the responsesand faculties that generate our value
judgments are in significant part the result of natural selection, there is no
reason to expect that they would lead us to be able to detect any
mind-independent moral or evaluative truth…That is because the ability to detect
such truth, unlike the ability to detect mind-independent truth about the
physical world, would make no contribution to reproductive fitness.” (11).

Nagel instead posits that in nature there are perhaps
teleological (or purposeful) laws at work, in addition to purely physical laws,
that make it likely that conscious creatures like us with the capacity for
reason and the ability to recognize objective values would come to be.He speculates that “natural teleology
would mean that the universe is rationally governing in more than one way – not
only through the universal quantitative laws of physics that underlie efficient
causation but also through principles which imply that things happen because
they are on a path that lead toward certain outcomes – notably, the existence
of living, and ultimately of conscious, organisms.” (12).

Nagel makes a distinction between the natural teleological
laws he is proposing and an intentional account, where a Being, such as God,
intervened to cause conscious creatures to exist.

However, Nagel does not give reasons why a natural
teleological explanation should be preferred to an intentional designer,
besides the fact that he seems to prefer the first.

Nagel’s conviction that the prevailing scientific consensus
of Darwinian naturalism is “a heroic triumph of ideological theory over common
sense” is an admirable statement of one who is not afraid to seek truth in
unpopular places.And, his attack
on this prevailing view is cogent, concise, and well argued.On the other hand, his suggestion of
what should be put in its place – natural teleology – is somewhat less
plausible.

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About Me

Welcome to my blog. Here you will find a collection of essays, short stories and poems I've been working on. You can view posts by categories under Labels below.
Born in Dublin, Ireland, I now live in Buffalo, New York with my wife and three children. I am graduate of Trinity College Dublin and the Law School at the University of Buffalo.
I am also the author of "Why It Doesn't Matter What You Believe If It's Not True", a book that examines the tensions between post-modernism and international human rights law.